I will disagree with him, however, that Obama’s education should be dropped. Not that I doubt the president’s education and want proof he really graduated, but I think it’s important to understanding him that we know what he studied and under whom. Who influenced him during his formative college years? Even though he now (for once in his life) has a public track record, a clearer understanding of his college days would prove useful.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 11:23 and is filed under Barack Obama, Conspiracy Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’m not saying asking questions is wrong. What frustrates me is the refusal on the part of advocates to accept reasonable answers (such as the contemporaneous birth announcements from Hawaiian newspapers) and instead either dismiss them as part of some conspiracy, or move the goal posts by ignoring those answers and posing other leading questions. (Not saying you do that, but it’s what I see from prominent birth-certificate conspiracy advocates.) And I find it exasperating when opportunists and nuts like Corsi and Taitz exploit otherwise reasonable people to maintain their 15 minutes of fame.

Ask yourself this: What is the whole point of questioning Obama’s birth certificate? To ensure the integrity of our elections? No, not for the Orly Taitzs of the world. For those who have been pushing it the strongest, I’m convinced it is an anti-democratic desire to overturn the results of the 2008 election, as wacky and disreputable as the Democrats efforts in Florida 2000 or Ohio 2004. And in times of turmoil, they exploit Americans’ fears to distract them from genuine, pressing issues.

Regarding the money Obama supposedly spent to keep this suppressed? How much really was it? All he has to do is tell Hawaii “No, I don’t want it released,” then pay some relatively chickenfeed fees to fight suits that were all tossed. (At least, I think they were all tossed.)

You mentioned my comment about his education, but I think that’s a wholly different beast. We know, thanks to Kurtz’s sterling research, that Obama’s education had a strongly Socialist tenor to it. That makes knowing who he studied under and what groups he participated in essential to understanding his mind and character. But, unlike the birth certificate controversy, there is a factual basis supporting the desire to know more.

There is none regarding his birth or what he may have been hiding. (Nothing, it turns out.)

Anyway, I’ll close this with something Jonah Goldberg wrote this morning in his newsletter:

What Took Him So Long?
I got a lot of grief from the usual types for asking why Obama dragged this out as long as he did. I still think it’s a perfectly legitimate question.

It seems to me that if there was no “there” there this whole time, the responsible thing would have been for a junior deputy assistant press secretary to release the thing over two years ago.

Think about it. Liberal surrogates in and out of the press and the administration have been saying for two years that the birthers are discrediting the Republican party. They’re racist. They’re nuts. They’re trying to tear down the president and the country with their paranoia. And yet Obama could have put the whole thing to rest with five minutes of paper shuffling. The White House only asked Hawaii for the birth certificate last week. And this was after we’d been told incessantly that Hawaii couldn’t find or couldn’t release the long-form birth certificate.

(Never mind that we never heard anything like the same level of outrage and dismay over the “truther” conspiracy theories, which A) were more widely held on the left than birtherism has been on the right and B) were far, far more repugnant. One theory held that a politician was hiding something on his birth certificate for political reasons. The other theory held that the United States government from the president down systematically planned and carried out the worst terrorist attack in American history and then successfully covered it up with the help of nearly all of our elite institutions.)

It seems to me the strategists around Obama liked it this way. They thought they could exploit the birthers the way Clinton exploited the militias. Keeping the story in the news by letting the birthers drive themselves nuts helped them. The press helped, too. Did you ever notice how whenever a Republican denounced the birthers or dismissed the issue, the press would often cast it as a tactical move to win moderates, not an act of conviction?

During the week of news coverage that Obama says was dominated by the birther issue, you were something like 35 times more likely to hear about the subject on CNN or MSNBC. Do you think those outlets framed the issue in a light favorable to the birthers or to the president? (Even now, the only media types really eager to prop up the birthers as a serious force are MSNBC hosts and their freelance producers at Media Matters & Co., who want to use the topic for guilt by association.)

Trump changed the equation. As odd as it is to me personally, Trump is a mainstream figure and his birtherism wasn’t discrediting the GOP because he’s not identified as a “real” Republican. And given the awful economy and the general pessimism out there, the birther thing had more salience culturally (which is unfortunate).

But also, Obama has been cultivating his image as the “grown-up.” The White House has been trying to position Obama as the adult in the room, above the squabbling parties. Releasing the birth certificate now and having the president denounce “silliness” and “distractions” was a great way to get that message out there.

Or at least it seemed that way. My hunch is that Americans are starting to figure who Obama really is — and the answer, as always, has nothing to do with his birth certificate.